Recognizing connected digits in a natural spoken dialog

This paper addresses the general problem of connected digit recognition in the telecommunication environment. In particular, we focus on a task of recognizing digits when embedded in a natural spoken dialog. Two different design strategies are investigated: keyword detection of word spotting, and large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition. We characterize the potential benefits and describe the main components of each design method, including acoustic and language modeling, training and utterance verification. Experimental results on a subset of a database that includes customers responses to the open-ended prompt "How may I help you?" are presented.